Seconds out... Mayo's strange tales of two halves

Many of those Mayo and Monaghan supporters who ventured to the back of the Gerry Arthurs Stand at half-time last Sunday week in search of refreshment or to use the facilities will have heard the bellowing voice of Andy Moran coming from inside the Mayo dressing-room. St Tiernach’s Park is still that old school up-close-and-personal type of ground that allows the sort of behind the scenes access Premier League fans could only ever dream of.

Andy’s tone and tenor revealed a side much different to the bubbly persona you’d be used to on the outside, and was of a man imploring to his players that an eleven point lead did not represent a job even half done. He knew what was about to come from Monaghan and perhaps more to the point, probably feared what might be about to come from Mayo. Because if this season has established one thing, it’s that Mayo are no second-half team.

The manager was right to be concerned as the Farney boys totally bossed the second-half and were horribly unlucky to only win that period by 2-11 to 0-7, which saw them lose the game by one point. Or not, had Bobby McCaul’s shot been flagged as over.

That game in Clones last Sunday week was Mayo’s 10th of the season in league and championship and while, as Andy Moran reminded the gloom and doom merchants afterwards, the Green and Red have won seven of those matches, they have also been outscored after half-time in six of those matches. In fact, in their last two games alone, Mayo have lost the second halves by 23 points combined, against Roscommon (13 points) and Monaghan (10 points). And that came on the back of a National Football League campaign that saw Mayo outscored after half-time in back-to-back Division 1 games by a combined 21 points, against Armagh (8 points) and Kerry (13 points).

It was a trend that had been set early doors of course, as Mayo won their opening round league game against Galway despite beaten on the scoreboard in the second-half by three points in Salthill. They lost the second-half too on their next away trip to Letterkenny, where Donegal had also won the first-half by six points against the wind, in between which did come the instance where Mayo actually won the second-half against Dublin by four points – but with the caveat that the game in Castlebar had seen the visitors forced to play most of the entire second-half with only fourteen players after the quite harsh dismissal of Sean MacMahon.

The only other instances of Mayo outscoring their opponents in the second halves of matches this season are against Monaghan and Roscommon in Division 1, where Monaghan’s defensive record was the second worst across all four divisions and where Roscommon fielded a second string team, and against London in championship – and even that was only by two points.

Perhaps the most glaring statistic of all, from a defensive standpoint at least, and one that certainly deserves urgent exploration from Andy Moran and his management team’s perspective, is that of the 16 goals Mayo have conceded to date this year, 13 have occurred after half-time. So for all the criticism and concern that has existed about the performance of the Mayo defence, could it be that there’s actually been some decent first-half displays by the back six along the way (think 0-5 conceded at home to Armagh for example) and that something more specific than just the personnel might be at play when things have begun to unravel.

That game against Armagh is interesting for another reason, because not since that match on the first day of March have Mayo managed to score a second-half goal, during which time they have conceded seven – and yet Mayo were still this season’s highest scoring team in Division 1.

Mayo have restricted opposition teams to single digit scores in the first-half of seven of their 10 games this season but to single digit scores in the second-half on only two occasions.

To delve a little deeper, Mayo have scored 145 points (8-121) in the first halves of their 10 games to date but only 112 points (6-94) after half-time. Their concessions have amounted to 86 points (3-77) before half-time but in what represents a quite staggering increase, 141 points (13-102) has been conceded in all the second halves combined.

To break that down further, Mayo are scoring an average of 3.3 points more in the first-half of games than they are in the second and conceding 5.5 points more in the second-half of games than they are in the first. Added together, it amounts to a quite wild fluctuation, the worst manifestations of which were when Kerry scored 2-16 in the second-half of the league game in Tralee, when Roscommon scored 1-17 after half-time in the Connacht SFC semi-final, when Armagh shot 0-17 in the second-half of the league game in Castlebar, and last time out when Monaghan tallied 2-11 after the interval in Clones.

Travelling to play Tyrone next Sunday then should make us very nervous, notwithstanding Mayo’s decent record against the Red Hands (we’ve won three of the last four meetings in all competitions but also eight of fifteen away games against Tyrone, last year’s championship win included).

Tyrone’s recent victory at Hyde Park against a Roscommon team that before that had looked much superior to Mayo, was one of the most noteworthy results of the first round of All-Ireland SFC games. Malachy O’Rourke’s side might only have scored 1-5 in the second-half, but it’s still more than the 0-7 Mayo have posted after the break in each of their last two championship outings.

The Green and Red have yet to win a game under Andy Moran by coming from behind in the second-half. Their style instead has been to sprint the 400m at 200m pace and hope the legs hold out. Whether Tyrone ask the question or not, the time is coming when Mayo might need to change tack and discover they have a late kick instead.

Read Stuart Tynan’s Mayo v Tyrone match preview on page 4.